The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  Janet leaned out the window. “I’m trying to get to the farm store. Up ahead, on the left. Can I get through, or will I have to go around?”

  “New Hope Farms?” said the second man.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to get there at all. We have an ongoing disturbance on that property.”

  “Like a car accident?”

  “I can’t say more.”

  Lingering tastes of cloves, cinnamon, and almond liqueur soured in her mouth. “You can certainly tell me. I own the property you’re parked on. That’s my son’s place. Let me speak to the Prout boy.”

  “Sorry, ma’am, we’re new on the scene and don’t have all the details. The family has been relocated—”

  “Goodness, where?”

  “Hold on, let me check.”

  Janet let her head tip back against the headrest. They didn’t need any more problems.

  Who on earth would have caused an “ongoing disturbance”? The boys were so levelheaded, and too young to cause any real problems. And certainly not Ronnie and Jeff. That couple never fought. Even now, poised for divorce, Ronnie was so damned civil about it that Janet wondered why she even found it necessary. Ronnie wouldn’t hurt Jeff. Ever since grade school, she’d been crazy about Janet’s son.

  A red-tailed hawk swooped down into the field beside Janet’s car and lifted off, a wriggling mouse in its talons.

  Wait.

  There was that time when Ronnie was depressed after college. And hadn’t Jeff mentioned that Ronnie was seeing a therapist? Yes—one determined to break them up, he’d said, because that’s when all this divorce talk started. Then the ranting about Jeff’s alcoholism and his need for medical intervention. And Ronnie had a spending problem, Jeff had told her. That sort of thing had a clinical name…oniomania. She saw it on The View.

  Janet recalled how ashamed Jeff had been when he came over. When was it, the beginning of September? He admitted to overextending himself to make his wife happy. Oh dear, it was all coming back to her now—how worried he’d been about Ronnie lately, that she’d taken on so much work that she was coming undone. Janet hadn’t made much of it, because truth be told, her son could be melodramatic at times. But his love for Ronnie, and his deference to Janet, had summoned her dormant maternal instinct back to life. And for the first time since his wedding, Jeff had wrapped his arms around Janet and thanked her. Janet felt plugged in. Important. Capable of making a difference.

  Where was that damn Prout boy?

  For the life of her, she didn’t know why Ronnie wasn’t as keen to accept help. As if Janet would draw the line at helping them financially, when they already lived in a house on property subdivided from hers. Janet would have given Jeff that fixer-upper for free if her lawyer had let her. Had she hoped the fifty thousand from her brother’s will might have seen them along a little further? Of course. But kids these days didn’t know how to stretch a dollar.

  The important thing was that Jeff had asked her for help when he needed it. Janet loved Ronnie, but that girl was just like her mother when it came to money—didn’t have a clue—and Janet certainly wouldn’t let Ronnie tell her how to deal with her own son.

  It would be his money anyway, once she died. Who knew? If this roll on her belly was cancerous, that might be tomorrow. So Janet had slipped him a check two weeks ago. That’s what family was for.

  What if the way Ronnie had been lashing out at her son lately had really been a reflection of her daughter-in-law’s own instability? By focusing on her words, had she missed the subtext of Ronnie’s plea for help?

  Just thinking this way made Janet’s brain ache. She was ill-suited for the role of counselor. Emotions were a messy business. She’d been a business teacher, everything in its place: A-S-D-F, J-K-L-semicolon, always beneath the same fingers. What could she offer Ronnie now, when their lives were such a mess? Her heart started to race. She took a long pull from the bottle in her purse.

  An Action News van nosed up to the police barrier. Right behind, an ambulance pulled into the field downhill, its wheels fitting perfectly into a set of tracks already visible in the long grass. A second ambulance?

  Why would—no. What if Ronnie had hurt herself? Some people resorted to such measures. Even Jeff had spoken of it when he was younger. Janet couldn’t bear it. Losing Ronnie to this divorce was bad enough. It was as if Janet’s own daughter sought emancipation. But losing her to self-harm would be a knife to the heart. Adrenaline prodded Janet’s memory. Genetics, if you believed in such a thing, were not on Ronnie’s side.

  Janet reached into her purse for another bolstering draft but pulled her hand out when the man she had queried before returned. “Please,” she said. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

  “The family is down at the firehouse. You can find out more down there.”

  The car stalled as Janet turned the wheel. “Don’t die on me now,” she muttered. The engine coughed a few times, then kicked back to life. The twenty-year-old Ford Escort wagon had rolled past 100K two times, but why worry about it; she’d go before it would.

  Janet pointed her car downhill and coasted to the firehouse, her need to know barely outweighing her need to avoid knowing. She could hardly think by the time she pulled up to the brick building. She parked in back, where you had to watch not to mow down families when picking up your barbecued chicken dinner during the twice-yearly fundraisers.

  Today, the lot was all but deserted.

  She went in the back door and walked down the hallway beside the fire truck bays. A policeman greeted her at the bottom of the familiar metal stairs that led up to the bar and second floor social hall. She and Beverly were both social members; their dues had helped purchase a secondhand ladder truck one of the larger companies was replacing.

  “I’m told my family is here,” Janet said. She wondered if she shouldn’t turn around and go home. Mind her own business and let Ronnie deal with the consequences of her own rash actions. But the boys. And Jeff—she pictured her soothing arms around him. “I need to see them.”

  “May I have your name, please?”

  “Janet Farnham. Jeffrey is my son.”

  “Do you have ID?”

  Janet tilted her large purse away from the man and pawed through it. Between raw nerves and light-adjusting lenses that never seemed to change fast enough when entering a dark building on a bright day, she could barely see and had to feel for her wallet. “Where’s Everett? He knows me—”

  “Jan.”

  Beverly appeared at the top of the stairs. Janet abandoned the cop and climbed to meet her.

  They threw their arms around each other and at the same time, each said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Janet closed her eyes and relished the moment. For all their differences, theirs was a friendship forged in the kiln of shared pain. It had survived the trauma surrounding Beverly’s teen pregnancy, Janet’s widowhood, Beverly’s divorces, and countless other disappointments. When life required that they surrender and readjust, they’d always had each other. As painful as it would be, she’d be the rock that Beverly and Jeff could cling to as Ronnie swept them into the torrent of her crisis.

  But Beverly was patting her back—comforting, not clinging. And why had Beverly said she was sorry? Janet pulled away. Looked at her friend. Looked past her and into the hall.

  Calmly conversing with a police officer at an unadorned banquet table, her hair returned to its youthful curls, sat Ronnie.

  ronnie

  Ronnie followed the policeman’s gaze to the door behind her and then rushed to greet her mother-in-law. Janet and her mother were so different: Janet short and unadorned, her thick gray bob like a cap on her head; Beverly taller than Ronnie with every facial feature artfully enhanced no matter the time of day.

  “Janet,” Ronnie said, stopping a few feet short of an embrace. “I was hop
ing you’d see that we should be together.”

  Confusion creased Janet’s brow. “I tried to stop by your store to get my broccoli—”

  The policeman called Ronnie back to the table. She looked to him, then back to her mother-in-law. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to deal with this.”

  Beverly put her arm around Janet and said, “Come sit with me and I’ll tell you what we know.”

  Her mother led her mother-in-law past the bar, a slab of lacquered oak wrapped around the front left corner of the room. On Friday nights, this was the slick stage on which alcohol could ply its magic, stimulating appetites and loosening inhibitions as social members unwound from their workweek. Today its spirits were secreted behind locked cabinets. The hall was set up for Monday night bingo, with a dozen or more rectangular tables in rows three across, surrounded by chairs awaiting their winners. Before she had kids, Ronnie had come along to play a time or two as a guest, the room so crowded that she and her mother had rushed to nab the last open seats. Even though their footsteps now echoed across its uncluttered floor, the space still felt aflutter with nervous anticipation as if these were the final tense seconds before some lucky stiff shouted “Bingo!”

  Beverly and Janet sat together at a table on the far side of the room. The boys, separated at different tables and each sitting with a uniformed officer, waved to their Grandma Jan. If she saw them, nothing registered on Janet’s face.

  Ronnie returned to the table some thirty feet from the entrance door where she’d been sitting with a police officer.

  “The officers at the farm reported in,” he said. “One found a spent casing up near a big patch of low-growing plants.”

  “The strawberry field.” She and Jeff had put it in that spring. Their last big project together. Ronnie felt the blood drain from her head. “Was Jeff—did they—”

  “They’re still searching for your husband. And there wasn’t any blood. I only told you because that could explain the shot you heard earlier.”

  “What do you think it means, that he shot the gun out there?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  Ronnie already wanted to rewrite this story. To edit the cop’s words. To distance herself, change “husband” to “the man.” The man now staggering around the property with a gun; the man who may already have taken a shot; the man whose angst was seeping into her own nerves. Her husband—the gentle soul she’d married—would never have acted like the man she’d engaged with earlier today.

  “Call him Jeff, please,” she said quietly.

  “I’m going to need you to recount all that transpired this morning with your—” He caught himself. “With Jeff. Leave nothing out. You never know what will be important.”

  The recitation she gave was devoid of animation. She felt empty and prickly, like an October cornfield in need of nutrients and a long, restorative winter. An evacuation from her home, beneath the cover of a helicopter dispatched from the state capitol, to protect her from her own husband? Ronnie felt as if her family had suddenly been thrust into an unwanted audition for a high-stakes reality show. Every few moments, as she delivered facts, she looked over at her mother, who was speaking quietly to Janet. She wondered if Beverly’s version differed. If her mother, or Jeff’s, blamed her. Because to them, and the rest of the world, it must look as if Jeff had been knocked off balance because Ronnie had decided to leave him.

  It even looked that way to her.

  The officer told Ronnie their primary goal was to locate Jeff, since he was armed and dangerous.

  “Please don’t say that in front of his mother,” she said. “Or the boys. Jeff isn’t a dangerous person. He’s sweet. Everyone would tell you how nice he is. Very laid back.” Too laid back. He never cared enough. “It’s just that we’re getting a divorce, and today was the day he promised to move out. He’s…” Drunk off his ass. “Agitated.”

  Ronnie rubbed her arms—the room suddenly chilled her. She hadn’t thought to grab a jacket. The room’s narrow, high-set windows, made of glass bricks, were meant to obscure natural light. This was a room designed to allow sparkles from a mirror ball, gropes in the shadows.

  And so what? She was cold. She felt selfish thinking about it, with Jeff frozen all the way to the center of his soul.

  “Could you give me a physical description of your husband so we can identify him by sight?”

  All that she and Jeff had meant to each other, all the intricacies of their marriage, boiled down to the same physical attributes that had first attracted her to him. “Five foot ten. Dark brown hair, thick, trimmed over ears some might call large.” Soft ears that lay flat against his head beneath her kisses. “Blue eyes.” Eyes that used to pierce her through with their naked honesty. “Broad hands.” Strong hands that always needed a project, now wrapped around a gun. “Forty-seven. His birthday is in eleven days—Halloween.” She told the officer that last year she and the boys had written and illustrated a book for Jeff, as a birthday present, about a cat named Trouble.

  “I’m sorry. That last part might not be relevant. But he’s a huge animal lover. Oh, and he”—she ran her finger down the line between her front teeth but could barely say the words—“has a gap.”

  “Do you recall what he’s wearing?”

  “A flannel shirt.” Jeff had lost weight and felt cold lately. “A denim jacket. It has tan corduroy here.” She touched the collar of her own shirt. “And jeans.” In his pocket, a money clip engraved: “Your love is my treasure.”

  beverly

  After an officer came over to take down what little Beverly had observed that morning and Janet had excused herself to use the restroom, Beverly pulled her chair around to the end of the table and leaned in toward the officer. She didn’t want her inquiry to echo across the room.

  “Listen,” she began. She looked over at Ronnie, and for a brief moment, their eyes met. The intensity of Ronnie’s gaze made Beverly look away. “My daughter doesn’t know this, but I was close to someone who committed suicide. So what are the chances I’ll know someone else? Slim, right?”

  “You looking for comfort, or statistics?”

  “I want comfort from statistics.”

  “I’m no specialist. But I do know that someone kills himself every fourteen minutes in this country.”

  “‘Himself.’ So these are men?”

  “Most of the people who attempt suicide are women, but most of those who succeed are men.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “More men use guns.”

  Beverly clutched her hand to her heart.

  The officer gathered up his papers, gave her a pitying look, and left her to her stunned silence.

  She felt awful for Ronnie, and for the boys. She’d been young herself, only seventeen, when she’d suffered her horrific loss. She’d given Dominic her virgin heart and all the faith and hope that clung to it—and he’d taken it right to the grave. His death had affected every decision she’d made since.

  Beverly knew Ronnie thought she was a lightweight. A flirt. But truth was, she had always hoped she’d find a true, deep love like what she’d witnessed between Ronnie and Jeff in their early years together. Lord knows she tried. With Tony. With Daryl. With Jim. But Beverly just couldn’t make love stick. Her love life was like a game of pinball: thrust forward by a lusty pull on a spring launcher, kept aloft by the flipper of determination, and then hitting a variety of bumpers on the way down the drain.

  Dominic’s beach house had finally lost its allure, and she’d quit going along with Ronnie, Jeff, and the boys. She understood why Ronnie wanted to go; that’s where she dreamed of her father. But that’s where Beverly had fallen in love with him, and each year it had gotten harder to experience the house exactly as it had stood without being able to conjure his spirit. It wasn’t that her wounds still bled; she just no longer saw the point in revisit
ing her scars.

  Beverly hadn’t dealt with Dom’s loss well at all, but at least she’d had a lifetime to try to get over it.

  As would Ronnie, if she lost Jeff today. That loss would hit her harder than Ronnie could ever imagine, but she was young and had presumably started to envision her life without him.

  But Janet would feel as if she herself had been shot if Jeff pulled the trigger today. And she’d carry a raw, gaping wound for the rest of her life.

  ronnie

  A couple of tables away, Ronnie heard an officer ask Will, “So what’s your dad like?”

  Will shrugged. Until today, Ronnie had still thought of her youngest as only a wisp of a boy, but there was hidden strength in his spine. How quickly he had rushed to his father’s side; how bravely he had fought for those keys. Just eight years old and he knew what he was about. The pages of Ronnie’s journals were her search for that kind of instinctual knowing and illustrated all too well the dangers of bending around others too long. It broke her to watch him arrange his face into a mask of indifference, like a man with secrets to keep. His swinging feet just grazed the floor. “He’s nice.”

  She felt certain Andrew was not giving a similar account on the other side of the room. Jeff had never understood Andrew. The family would be raking leaves onto tarps for compost, and Andrew, consumed by other thoughts, would inevitably slip into a daydream and then dance off to the house to draw, or organize his rock collection, or add another alien race to his science fiction screenplay. They’d find the rake abandoned somewhere between the road and the front door. Jeff thought of Andrew as a slacker. Ronnie knew that one day her older son would choose to leave the rural life of eastern Pennsylvania for a richer cultural landscape—and half of her would want to go with him.

  Will was the one who wanted in on any project Jeff undertook. Jeff had given him a small tool belt, complete with junior-size tools. When Will donned his work goggles, he was a mini version of his dad.